Gaseous promises
HERE is how to win the next election: promise that the gasman will make an appointment and keep it. People should not have to waste time and lose a day's wages waiting for engineers to attend. Service engineers should be in continual contact by radio, and be expected to phone the customer if they cannot make the appointed time.' Who says so? The Labour Party now says so. There can have been no more popular promise since that chap stood for Parliament in Birmingham on a policy of abolishing one-way streets. It is part of Labour's prospectus for 'social ownership' — itself a classic example of what the motor industry calls badge en- gineering: if people won't buy Morrises, try calling them MGs. You may search the policy document in vain for any reference to nationalisation, public corporations, or state ownership. All is to be social and, by implication, sociable, like the punctual gasman. Labour is right to promise him, but delivering him will be a function not of ownership, but of competition. It is the monopoly supplier of services whose staffs will not make appointments, just as it is the monopoly supplier of medical services which piles the patients up to lose wages in the surgery. Waiting lists are the means whereby a monopoly suits its convenience, and retains its power, for a monopoly with a fully-supplied market is a busted flush. It is dispiriting to see the point missed on both sides of politics — the Conservatives privatising telephones and gas while still leavilig them in their old monopolistic shape, Labour, too, thinking of the own- ership and taking the shape for granted. Labour calls Mercury, the Cable & Wire- less domestic network, a blatant cream- skimming operation which must be put back into Telecom. City customers (and the City is by far Telecom's biggest custom- er) would say that the threat of Mercury has done more for them than anything. By the way, how do the engineers ring you to stand you up if your phone is out of order?
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